Stephen Hawking Quotes
It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God.
Hawking, Stephen, and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. Bantam Books, 2010, p. 172.
The layman assumes that for every action there must be a reaction, and every action in turn most have had a previous causing action. This is classic Newtonian Physics and was believed by almost all scientists until the latter part of the 20th century when Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, the Big Bang and other important scientific ideas permeated beyond just a few elite scientists. Today, there are a number of demonstrations of how the universe came to be where there is no first cause or prime mover. See Hawking’s quote relating to this point—{633342}.
Voltaire was also an amateur scientist and was familiar with the new physics of Newton. His mistress, was one of the best scientists in France and the translator of Newton into French. Voltaire marveled at the logic that drove the universe and assumed that there must have been a prime mover. At the same time, although believing in God, Voltaire, like many other intellectuals of the time, were major enemies of organized religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. See {621191} .
This quotation is very interesting with reference to the modern debate about teaching creationism in the public schools. Two hundred years before, Shelly observed that before we can debate as to who was the designer, we must first prove that there was a design. He was skeptical, and this was before Darwin and modern astronomy. Today there are physicists who have shown how the Big Bang might have taken place without any plan, design or creation. And evolution explains how mankind and other life forms may have evolved without any specific species management or design.
His concept of the devine however was quite different and much more abstract than the Rabbis, Priests and Imams of the time. Albert Einstein, was a religious Jew, but his view of God was that of Spinoza (See Quotation 631763) who had been excommunicated by the Jews. Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims. Spinoza did not believe in a kins of anthropromorphic God who fabricated the earth and the stars. He saw God in the devine nature of the earth and the heavens and the mathematical rules that govern everything. It was this abstraction that was Spinoza's God which made sense to Einstein. Got was in the order, physical laws and mathematics of the universe. Modern scientists who are religious have no difficulty with the probablsitic nature of much of the physics that governs the univrese. It was God who created or more abstractly, was the mathematical and physical laws that in turn allowed the universe to be created from nothing.
Stephen William Hawking CH CBE FRS FRSA was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge at the time of his death. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge between 1979 and 2009.
